The IRI apologists group Ayatollah Khatami
with the likes of Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela,
Mikhail Gorbachev, Dalai Lama, and even Elie Wiesel, but they do not tell us what political *action*
Ayatollah Khatami has taken to qualify him to be in
such company.

The truth of the matter is that the
best comparison for President Khatami is President Zemin of China. They both focus on rule of law and surely they both
leave out institutions of “judgment by the people”:

If Jiang Zemin was a worthy successor
to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, Mohammad Khatami has been a worthy successor
to Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. In a way, “emAm Khomeini” was “Chairman Mao”
of Iran. HojatoleslAm Rafsanjani was Deng
Xiaoping of Iran. Aytaollah Khamenei has been Li Peng of Iran. And President Khatami
has been President Zemin of Iran.

On June 4th,
1989, during the crack down on the Chinese students movement in Tiananmen Square, Jiang Zemin
pleased the Chinese communist hardliners. The same way, on July 9th,
1999, during the crack down on the Iranian students’ movement, Mohammad Khatami pleased
the Iranian Islamist hardliners:

The focus of US both in China and
Iran has been
to get concessions from their existing governments. In China,
the US mainly used the Tiananmen Square to get more concessions from the People’s Republic of China. In Iran,
the US is mainly using
the pro-democracy movement, Reza Pahlavi, and MKO as
leverage to get more concessions from Islamic Republic of Iran.

One big difference between China and Iran is that when Communism fell in China’s neighbor, the Soviet
Empire, the uncertainty and disorder in
the aftermath of the fall, scared the Chinese people, who avoided the same drastic
change in China. In contrast, the
fall of Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanestan, has had
good vibrations in Iran, and Iranians like to see similar changes and full
secularization in Iran:

Nonetheless, as far as the
US is concerned, its policy is mainly focused on getting concessions from
President Khatami’s government, unless a strong
movement for change, such as what we saw in the Eastern Europe, sweeps Iran. In short, it is all in the hands of
the Iranian
people and not the US, as to whether Iran will get stuck with its Islamic
regime, the same way China is stuck with its Communist regime, or not.